The Roterfaden

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’ve been in full goblin mode work immersion this week, have barely looked at anything on the internet or, frankly, outside.

I’ve got like 250 emails in my inbox. I have previously talked about Inbox Fuckit as opposed to Inbox Zero but now it’s more like Inbox AWOL. Terrible, really. 

Did you ever open Deadline and read about the cancellations of tv shows you’ve never even heard of? I looked at Deadline on Friday and there were a slew of stories about tv shows ending or being cancelled and I’d never heard of bloody any of them. 

The last thing I watched on streaming was twenty minutes of the Guy Ritchie film INTO THE GREY, a supposed action movie, which played like a heist movie co-produced by Wes Anderson. Twenty minutes of nothing but arch exposition and surtitles, heavily intercut, one sequence narrated while the character makes an extremely elaborate Negroni with all the steps shown and annotated on screen. Absolutely bizarre thing. Like an inaction movie. And yet - a high level of invention. I must confess, I really want to rewatch those twenty utterly physically inert yet completely fascinating minutes and then find out if the rest of the film is like that. I had to pause it just after the sequence where a guy names twenty weapons by their nicknames while the real names of those weapons are written on the left of the screen as a list. As formal graphic invention goes, it’s not quite what you expect from a straight-to-Amazon film. Really worth you sitting and taking a look, ideally with a notebook to hand.

Somewhere between autumn and Indian Summer here. I will miss the passing of summer, but this week I made the mental shift into preparing the kitchen for autumn food and stacking the print books and magazines to curl up with in the evenings. I have mead. 

Horns Of Odin call their standard 70cl mead bottles Feast Bottles. I love that. 

OPERATIONS

THE ROTERFADEN

Longtime readers may recall that I have coveted the Roterfaden notebooks for a few years. They are very expensive, very well made, a discreet logo debossed into the leather on the back cover. They don’t show off.

So last month I finally cracked and ordered one. It took a few weeks to arrive from Germany.

Packaging is largely a lost art. A small effort has been made here that I appreciate.

They send you a pencil for free, which was kind of terrible for me because I’ve been trying not to go down a pencil rabbit hole. Gel pens are bad enough. But the craving for the tactile - it suddenly occurred to me the other day that it’s another version of “Reality Hunger” - is why I keep looking at Blackwings. 

There are a lot of different versions to choose from. I went for the Taschenbegleiter BS_20 in the M format, which is A5.

Leather cover, and a merino wool felt interior, for God’s sake. Mad. The whole thing FEELS amazing. Pockets sewn in.

Most notebook covers use elastic bands to keep the notebooks in. Roterfaden are German engineering. They use steel clips to hold the notebooks, a solution somewhere between Bauhaus and Krupps. 

I bought some of their own notebooks to try, although any A5 notebook will obviously do. Roterfaden means “red thread,” and you can see that signature red thread on the spines of the notebooks. I have two of the standard A5 notebooks and this weird list-making thing. The notebooks come in either blank or dot-grid, the latter being another Bauhaus touch. And they appear perfect-bound but fall perfectly flat, the red thread revealed again in the middle of the book. Dot-grid is not my favourite, but these are excellent notebooks.

The “Listen” is a pack of six sheets each folded into four, with perforations. Clip one of the sheets in and you have four long list sheets that you can tear out when done. Probably not essential, but I was curious. 

Oh, and this is an extra I picked up - a leather pen case they call a Pen Whale. I have a new Drehgriffel Gel Pen to go in there. 

Roterfaden.de.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least two other major reprint projects in the works from them, one that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

ORBITAL

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily-ish noon-ish roundup post

• A care package from Zoharum Records

• new pens

• Northern Earth and fancy treats

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

Right. I need to finish writing up an outline then script up the opening of a project for this newsletter. Once again, I live in hope that changes are coming here. But I also know from decades of experiences that some plans just don’t work out. Not the end of the world. Adapt, move on, think of something else. Tomorrow will always have something new. Let’s you and me stick around for tomorrow.

W